India is being torn apart by pseudo-nationalists who proclaim unabashed love for the nation by demanding allegiance to hollow slogans while negating Constitutional values such as women’s equality to men, the right to dissent , and abrogation of ancient religious traditions which deny women the right to worship as they please because of the divine mandate of a patriarchal Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Whether they scream Bharat Mata Ki Jai just to give it a try or not, is not as vital as whether tradition should override Constitutional values or the other way around.
ROHITH Vemula provoked a national controversy as to what caste he belonged to after his catastrophic suicide. It was weird because in death as in life, Vemula was always an Indian. Whether he was a Dalit or not is bizarre because it appears that our identity is determined by caste, language and region which override our love for India with the potential to dismember it.
Shankaracharya Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati has cautioned women against exulting after breaking a 400-year-old tradition by entering the sanctum sanctorum of the Shani Shingnapur temple at Nevasa in Ahmednagar district in Maharashtra because “it is a planet of sins” which will incite more sex-starved men to rape women. The deity is a celibate who is allegedly easily distracted by menstruating women between 10 and 50 years of age, never mind the fact that this makes him more of a man than a deity.
Also, never mind logic, science and the fact that the Constitution guarantees women equal rights as men to enter temples whether they are bleeding or not and Article 13 abrogates all laws existing before January 26, 1950 which violates fundamental rights. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has opposed the Supreme Court’s endeavour to study if triple-talaq is valid under our Constitution. Muslim men divorce their supine wives by gleefully pronouncing triple-talaq on WhatsApp, Skype, email, mobile phones and SMS abusing this concept in the Sharia law which has never changed and never will, negating the concept of a secular India.
So also, a Rohith Vemula provoked a national controversy as to what caste he belonged to after his catastrophic suicide on January 17, 2016. The controversy was weird because in death as in life, Vemula was always an Indian. Whether he was a Dalit or not is bizarre because it appears that our identity is determined by caste, language and region which override our love for India with the potential to dismember it. Similarly, Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested after allegedly shouting anti-national slogans which he denied after being released on bail, claiming he was not seeking freedom from India but freedom within India, which is acceptable. Whether he is a Marxist or devout Hindu is strictly his private affair. And whether he raised anti-India slogans or not is yet to be proved in court.
Hence, by using caste, religion, race, language, sex, descent, place of birth and region, we have negated the values of Articles 15,16, 21 and 25 which in gist guarantee the right of non-discrimination on any of these grounds and also Article 19 (1) (e) which guarantees all Indians the right to reside and settle anywhere within India — something with which MNS founder, Raj Thackeray, may disagree. The resignation of former advocate general Shrihari Aney was a result of this pseudo-nationalism when he gave fiery speeches calling for separate states of Marathwada and Vidarbha where more than 800 farmers have killed themselves with successive chief ministers doing nothing.
Making a mockery of Article 16 (non-discrimination on grounds of place of birth or language), most Indian states have been named after the languages which their people speak. These pseudo-nationalists who live in Tamil Nadu (Tamil), Karnataka (Kannada), Orissa (Oriya), Maharashtra (Marathi), Punjab (Punjabi), Gujarat (Gujarati), provoke us to ask if those who claim to be patriots believe their love for their linguistic state overrides their love for Bharat Mata or vice versa because if it is the latter then their love for their region will be negated as they see themselves as Indians first, last and foremost irrespective of their language, caste or religion. For, our passports declare we are citizens of India and not citizens of any linguistic state. Jai Hind!
The author is a journalist-turned lawyer of the Bombay High Court with a PhD in media law.
